The present invention relates generally to the field of information organization, access, and presentation and more particularly to the management and presentation of information based on the relevance of its semantic content to a user's current interests.
The management and presentation of large amounts of information to a user in a manner that does not impose a high cognitive burden is a growing challenge as the amount of data that is available to be considered and analyzed steadily increases. Machines can help by performing a triage on available information, estimating what is relevant to a current focus and thereby decreasing the amount of information a user must consider. The amount of relevant information considered is one component of the burden, but equally significant is the form in which the information is presented. If information can be presented in a way that simply reflects relationships among the information considered and the strength of these relationships, then the cognitive burden imposed on the user can sometimes be decreased.
A force directed graph is a means for presenting information and the relationships between information. The idea of a force directed graph is to spatially represent a set of nodes, where a node is a data or information (e.g., text, a word, an email), such that nodes rendered in proximity to one another tend to be more intimately connected to one another along some dimension or set of dimensions (e.g., a topic discussed in the nodes if, say, the node represent text), and such that the attraction among like nodes and repulsion among non-like nodes obeys a force-distance relationship known from physics. Force-directed graph drawing algorithms are a class of algorithms for drawing graphs in an aesthetically pleasing manner.